 Hello, hello, hello, and welcome. I'm Merron Khalili and we are DM25, a radical political movement for Europe. And this is another live debate with our coordinating team featuring subversive ideas you won't hear anywhere else. And today we're talking about the United Kingdom or more specifically the political chaos in the United Kingdom. Yes, Britain normally has a reputation as a pretty stable country, but it's now had three prime ministers in just two months. The middle one, Liz Truss, announced the biggest tax cuts in living memory and then reversed them, bringing the economy to the edge of economic collapse. She lasted 44 days. Her replacement, once again, unelected, is a man of the people, just not many people. He's Rishi Sunak, a former hedge fund manager with a net worth twice that of King Charles and now the richest ever occupant of number 10. But the political soap opera aside, regular Brits are going through a very tough time. They're contending with soaring food and energy prices, rising mortgages, and a growing pension crisis. More than one million more people in the UK are expected to be forced into poverty this winter, pushing deprivation levels to their highest for two decades. And on top of it all, their new government is now priming them for more austerity with familiar talk of hard choices, now making the rounds in establishment media. So what can British people and those around Europe expect from this latest unelected Tory government? What is the opposition Labour Party, which is leading in all polls for the next-general election offering? And what can UK voters that actually want policies that put people first vote for? To answer these questions and more, we have our panel, which includes our own Yanis Varoufakis and UK campaigner Julia Moore. And we have a special guest today, Marsha Jane Thompson, previously the head of campaigns for Jeremy Corbyn, and now coordinator of the campaign, Your NHS Needs You. And you out there, if you have anything you want to say, any questions, comments, thoughts, rants, concerns, just drop them in the YouTube chat. This is live and we'll put them to our panel. Let's kick off with Yanis over to you. Thank you, madam. Hello, everyone. Hello, comrades. Just before we start, you just joined the live stream and a facetious, but not utterly pertinent comment that I made. I said that the problem with my British friends, whether they are Tories or Corbynistas, like myself, is that you think that you're too exceptional. You think that either you're exceptional and fantastic, that Britannia rules the waves and the airwaves and our psyche. Britannia is so deeply fucked that it is exceptional in this opposite way. And my adieu for my friends in Britain is that folks, you're neither. You're neither exceptionally brilliant, nor exceptionally terrible. You're somewhere in between, like the rest of us, you know. We are mundane, all of us. We're here in Greece, in Germany, in France. We are in a stagnation crisis, a crisis of stagnating financialized capitalism, where the crisis that began in 2008 flares up. One day in Greece, another day in Italy, another day in Britain, but it's the same crisis. We are all in the same ship. It's a terrible ship. It is leaking, it is taking in water and the people below decks, the many, the poorer, the exploited, the precarious, the proletariat are suffering deeply, not just in Britain, but everywhere else. But allow me to... Oh, by the way, one small comment, madam, as comrades, we need to take each other to task and keep the debate lively. So let me challenge the very conventional accounts that you presented to begin with. This thing about unelected governments, come on. I really don't buy that. I mean, unless you want a presidential system, a parliamentary system is the best of all possible laws. And yeah, that means that parliament will have the capacity to elect and reelect prime ministers. The alternative to that is a system like that of the United States of France. And that is a terrible system. Effectively, it's the manifestation of first-past-the-post, electing essentially a parliamentary... A parliamentary, electing an emperor. And so, the fact that the Tory party have messed things up and they have given us three idiots, one after the other in quick succession in 10 Downing Street, it's not the fault of the electoral system. It's the fault of those people in the Labour Party who did their utmost to undermine Jeremy Corbyn so that the Brexiteers under Johnson would win. And unfortunately, we have a situation now where the greatest usurper of British democracy, a certain Mr. Sir Keir Starmer, is going to become the greatest beneficiary of the cares that he has helped seal with that idiotic campaign of his for a second referendum, but I'm digressing. So let's go back to what has gone down over the last few months since the pandemic's ebbing. After 2008, when the city of London, Wall Street, the Frankfurt banks, the Paris banks went bankrupt, central banks and governments under the leadership of Gordon Brown, let us not forget, April 2009, Gordon Brown got all of the G7 presidents, prime ministers, central bankers and the practice socialism for the financiers, socialism for the oligarchs. They printed my estimation of about $18 trillion to give it to the bankers. That took the form of zero interest rates, what's called quantitative easing, targeted long-term refinancing options. These are all the technical terms for socialism for the bankers. And that created a deflationary period because there was austerity at the same time for the many, in Greece, in Britain, to Osborne, Germany, everywhere, Italy. So the result was that there was a lot of money in the financial sector and no money in the pockets of people out there. Investment collapsed because who wants to produce stuff for a public that doesn't have any money? So the money who had the money outbid one another in the stock exchange, in the South of England, buying houses, works of art, Bitcoin, any kind of agency that was available, they bought it with the money that was printed by the central banks. And then there was the lockdown. And the lockdown did two things which changed and the situation and shattered this bubble of financialization. Of course, 2008, 2009 financialization. The first thing that the pandemic did was it choked supply by stopping transport, sea transport, land transport, air transport by disrupting the supply chains. Suddenly, aggregate supply of goods and services was choked. And at the same time, for the first time since 2009, some of the money that was printed by the central banks trickled down to the many third schemes and some support for those who would have otherwise died locked up in their flats and houses. So your combination, supply goes down because of lockdown, demand creeps up a little bit, demand for the goods and services that the many could now spend the little furlough wages and social benefits that they got during the pandemic. When demand goes up and supply crashes, prices go up. So we had the first inflationary about 13 years after the crash of 2008. And that shattered these socials for the bankers and austerity for everybody else, equilibrium. The United Kingdom is not exceptional in that. The situation that you face in the United Kingdom is exactly the same as the financial situation that we face in the European Union and the Eurozone. Actually, it's worse in the Eurozone. I will say a few words about that in the United States and so on. What happened was that, yeah, there must be some canary in mind. Britain was the canary in the G7 mind. It could have been somebody else. It could have been Germany. It could have been the United States. This bond crisis, the crunch that created the panic in the financial markets, in the gilt markets, in the markets of the United Kingdom, public debt, which led to the demise of least trust, could have started anywhere. The fundamentals of Britain were not worse than those of the rest of the financialized capitalist worst, West. It just so happened that the UK did to the rest of the G7 that which Greece had done to the rest of the Eurozone in 2009. It was a dirty job of bursting the bubble and somebody had to do it. The reason why it happened in the United Kingdom was because you had the demise of Boris Johnson. Now, remember, as Britain was getting out of the second lockdown, this Kisunak, who was the chancellor of the Exchequer, the finance minister of Britain, made noises, made austere noises. He started talking about doing some austerity in order to arrest the buildup of debt. And Boris Johnson, who is a far better politician than Rishi Tsunak, who has a sense of what the people out there want, not that he is going to give it to them, but he's more of a astute political antenna than Rishi Tsunak is, slapped Tsunak down. I said, no, you're not doing that. I want to be prime minister. I don't want another austerity averse UK public to turn against the Tories. But when Partigate and various other shenanigans brought Johnson down, there was a question of who was going to succeed him. Tsunak had the inner lane, the inside lane, and then Listeras decided that the way she's going to defeat Tsunak was by appealing to some of thatch's legacy, small parts of her legacy, and try to attack Tsunak from the right, from the libertarian light, talking about huge tax cuts, especially for the rich. You cannot lose with the rank and file of the Tory party if you promise huge tax cuts for the rich, because this is how there are a bunch of old regressives, reactionaries who are voting for the leadership of the Tory party. Amongst the MPs, she was not supported as much as Rishi Tsunak was, but she won the popular vote, the vote within the Tory party, amongst those who have never heard of a bad war or a tax cut for the rich that they didn't like. The least tragedy and the reason why she's sparked of this domino effect was that she did something that the markets were not forgiving her for. The markets were intermoiled in the United States and to a lesser extent Britain before had a mini budget. She reversed the order of what the markets and the rich wanted. They wanted austerity first and then tax cuts, which is what Thatcher had done. Thatcher had slapped down austerity. I remember I lived in Britain at the time after April, 1979. She destroyed the working class through austerity. And then once the fiscal situation of the UK state was stabilized, she redistributed income through tax cuts. Lestras reversed it. She proposed huge tax cuts, didn't say anything about austerity, hoping that by the time her prime ministership was safe, she would in six months, seven months, eight months, she would impose huge austerity. Because the markets were so unstable, she was punished. And now Rishi Sunak has come back to do that which he was trying to do when he was chancellor. On behalf, to do Mario Draghi, to do what Mario Draghi did in Italy, what the Troika did in Greece, what Thatcher did after the 1981 budget in particular. But allow me to finish by saying a few words about we are a pan-European democratic movement. Now, let's look at Germany. Okay, so my friends in Britain, you're not as stuffed as you think. Look at Germany. Half of Germans rent rather than own property. And they typically keep their savings in bank accounts. They have no financial assets. They don't own homes, they don't own shares. They've missed out the middle class of Germany, thus have missed out on the compensating wealth gains of the last decade from the socialism for the rich. And now there's being struck by inflation, which increases their rents much faster than your housing costs in Britain increase while the savings that are in a simple savings account are being depleted faster than yours are due to inflation. If you look at the bottom 10% of the German population, they're 8% worse off today than they were in 1995. And if you look at the top, the bottom 40% of the German population, they are stuck in the same place as they were in 1995. And now they're facing a commodity squeeze, electricity bills through the roof and so on. Because of the structure of the German political economy, I just explained why inflation is so much more toxic in Germany because of very few assets being owned by the average German. Inflation is much more of a problem. Now, let me remind you that when the European Central Bank was put together and the German state agreed to subject itself to the European Central Bank and to subjugate the German Central Bank, the Buddhist Bank to the ECB, the contract, the implicit contract was that the ECB would work and act as the Buddhist Bank did. Let me tell you a back of end envelope calculation that I've done. If that were the case, we should have 7.5% interstates in the Eurozone. That will destroy Italy. The Italian state will go bankrupt, not just Italy because there's a lot of focus on Italy. Let me give you some numbers which I've just joked down here. If you look at the total debt, private and public in France, it's 351% of French national income. Three and a half times French national income. In the case of Britain, it's only 2.7 times, 271. It's 200 in Germany. The Italian total debt is about the same level as the British one. So, DiEM25 needs to focus on this crisis being the same crisis that began after 2008. It is the same Germany in France, in Italy, in Greece, and in the United Kingdom. We don't give a damn about Brexit. For us, the United Kingdom is part of Europe, not the European Union, but part of Europe. And we will have to campaign in the United Kingdom, in the European Union, everywhere, to save our NHS from austerity, to save the precarious from austerity or to bolster their defenses against austerity, same with the proletariat, same with women, minorities who are always the first victims of austerity because austerity is back with the vengeance. Elisha Sunak was trying to reduce this under Boris Johnson. Now he has his chance. And let me finish off in the way that I finished in an article in the new statesman, which are things came out today or is coming out tomorrow in paper form, in print form. A small point, which I think confirms the DiEM25 line about the need for collective action across Europe and the UK. Do you know what Mario Draghi, who shut down the Greek banks and practiced austerity in Italy, Mario Monti, who was appointed by Angela Merkel to be prime minister in Italy in order to reduce the earlier state of austerity, Lukas Papadimos, who became the Greek prime minister, technocratic prime minister in 2011, to usher in and to solidify the murderers, murderers, genuinely murderous austerity that we had done. And Elisha Sunak have, they all worked for Goldman Sachs. Thank you. Thank you, Yanis. Marsha Jane. Marsha Jane Thompson, floor is yours. Great, thanks everyone. And it's, I mean, like it's a really depressing time politically in the UK. So, you know, I was hoping I come onto events like this and we can do what international solidarity is. We get strength from each other in fighting back, but, you know, as Yanis said, we're fucked. So, but I'm sure that we will all take some inspiration from each other. And actually, we are obviously still making a difference with the fantastic UNHS CGU campaign that I'll come onto. But just to kind of briefly end of here, you know, obviously, Meron and Yanis have already mentioned we've had a revolving door of prime ministers and cabinet members, like for the health secretary, we've had four now in a hundred days or something ludicrous. We have Elisha Sunak. Again, Meron said twice as rich as the king and a nice former banker, billionaire, million-pound houses in California, as well as Yorkshire and London. And he's going to undoubtedly try and gloss over his record in government when he was the chancellor. He was at the helm when the Tory chaos and incompetence reached its height and caused the cost of living crisis. And you can't really stress how bad the cost of living crisis is in some parts of the UK. We have in the Northeast, 39.4% of our kids hungry in complete food poverty in the six richest country in the world. People don't see the faces behind those statistics, but that's virtually half of every class actually sitting there hungry through their lessons as a direct result of Sunak's choices. As chancellor, we have seven million people living in cold homes, thousands of excess winter deaths last year. And this year, millions more in fuel poverty because of their failures to handle the fuel cost crisis. And Boris Johnson famously said, you let the bodies pile high in COVID, but we're seeing many more bodies pile high now through the impact of their 12 years of austerity. And as Janice said, the new austerity 2.0 that's coming soon. We've had those 12 years of cuts and left us with a housing crisis, a crisis in social care, a crisis in education. We're seeing bits of people fighting back now. We're seeing hundreds of thousands of workers saying enough is enough from barristers to bin workers, nurses, ambulance workers, posters, teachers, everyone sort of saying that our pay is so low now. There was always that sound by even a year or two years ago, people choosing between heating or eating. And we are inundated with people that can't do either. They can't afford to exist. They're food banks and warm banks. And we know SUNAC is just going to continue in that vein. Our austerity 2.0, yes, but also still making decisions to give tax cuts to the richest, still making decisions on lifting bankers' bonuses. And I know that as part of the discussion tonight, to move us onto the NHS is whether or not progressives should be calling for a general election, whether or not it's a bit of a distraction, whether or not we have a huge democratically elected by our parliamentary system and what should be done about that. But from the NHS's point of view, regardless, we need a campaign to save the NHS. Now it's not going to last until the next general election whenever that comes. It's not going to last for the next few months if we don't really kind of ramp up our campaigning around that. We've seen decades of privatisation by itself just destroying various bits of the NHS from the bed capacity to staffing to bits of it completely siphoned off to different private companies from Centine and American health insurance companies coming here and just buying big chunks of it. To the extent of, in the last 10 years now, we've given 100 billion from the NHS budget directly to profit-making companies directly at the expense of the services that we've been provided just to take one kind of small recent example rather than bore everyone with stats, but one quite specific one that came out just this week is that Pfizer made from the UK two billion in profit from the vaccine. So just the profit was two billion. That's six times the amount that the pay rise for nurses would cost. That money could revolutionise that what's left of the NHS already. And what we're seeing in the NHS in the main, but also in other areas of public services is the function of the government not being to govern, but the function of the government purely being to transfer public money into corporate hands as much as they can. That impacts on the health of people in the UK. I've mentioned the poverty stuff, but it's the preventable deaths in the NHS. We are seeing thousands of deaths that could have been prevented that are now happening because of privatisation with direct links to privatisation. Whether or not that be because there's 12 ambulances waiting in queues outside the hospitals that can't get in or from overcrowding or from people dying on trolleys because the doctors hasn't got round to them yet because of the lack of doctors. We're seeing people that are not getting their diagnosis from breast cancer because it's all been outsourced in the diagnostics and there's various different scandals coming to light about documents being lost that's all been, there's all the direct link to privatisation and moving it on. But there's just, obviously, I could go into details for hours on the various different minutiae of problems in the NHS. But that's kind of really what brings me on to the NHS need you campaign and why kind of DM and other UK partners decided we needed to do this because obviously we're speaking to internationally but in the UK people don't know that this is what's going on in the NHS. It's been done so underhandedly over years or by stealth that people haven't realised the impact of that and they're starting to look at that. I think post-COVID and the obscene amounts of profits that people saw being made by PPE while nurses were wearing bin bags or from test and trace being such a monumental failure and taking billions. People are kind of looking at it and saying we want to know where that money's going now. There's a higher level of scrutiny of these type of things. So we decided we were going to try and speak to some celebrity voices to use their platform to get the message out there what's happening and this is the kind of last chance saloon if you like. So we had a big comedy night with comedians that hopefully are internationally famous like Stephen Fry and Frankie Boyle and they lent their voices to the campaign and told people to go and look at your NHS needs you.com and to get involved and to drill down into exactly what's happening. We're now about to embark on a project with Russell Brand and he's again lending us his voice and his YouTube show to get, not just our voices on there but also people that have been impacted by privatisation and campaigners and doctors that have been involved with us. So yesterday we had Dr. Bob Gill on Russell's show talking specifically about the impact of the blood service and the plasma service in the NHS which when Jeremy Hunt who is the new shadow chancellor who says he's going to rescue us from the 12 year of Tory chaos, when he was the health secretary he sold the National Health Blood Service the plasma service to an American company called Bain for 240 million and the American company sold it to a Chinese company. And so now we have a crisis in our blood service and people can't have operations because there is enough plasma and that's leading to extra deaths. So we need to really get that out there but we also need to get out there that the National Health Service as we know it has already been destroyed. In England, it's already been broken up into 42 different pieces. Those 42 different pieces all have their own budget, their own little board that can make corrupt contracts to their own little private companies and it's the kind of mass destruction of the National Health Service as we can see it. So check out Dr. Bob on Russell's show yesterday which is at Rusty Rockets and have a look at Yanis is hopefully coming on again in a couple of weeks to talk to us all about it as well because it's obviously not just important for the UK. The NHS has been held up as a beacon for other countries for a while and we were talking before about the impact after the financial crisis on Greece's doctors and everything like that. And before anybody screams at me about labor I've not tried intentionally missing them out. Obviously they did also have a massive huge impact on the NHS, the legacy of PFI is that currently I think there's still 80 billion pounds just for NHS hospitals to fix and that's historical but even now currently we see Labour spokespeople talking about public private partnership and talking about using the private sector to bring down the seven million on the waiting list which obviously doesn't work. The more private sector people you bring in to bring down the waiting list they cherry pick the easy cases and take a load of money out of it and actually the waiting lists get longer. Definitely on an individual level people with more serious cases wait a lot longer. So unless we really kind of ramp up our campaign which we're hoping that we are doing now with this everything with Russell Brand and everything else, we hope you check it out which is at your NHS need you and get involved with us and hopefully we can stop the full Americanization of the NHS. Thank you Marsha Jane and well I can speak to that what you've seen, I just came back from the UK and I saw a family member who's in an NHS hospital and the state is horrifying. It's absolutely horrifying what I saw there and people don't deserve that. It's anyway, Julia Moore. Thank you, thank you Miran. Carrying for Marsha Jane. Yeah, or actually if I can carry on for Miran. Yeah, two very close friends, family members. One mild heart attack, no ambulance even promised was taken to hospital by her own family and a dear friend who had a bad fall at home 11 and a half hours on the floor because of the lack of services in that particular area. So very much the NHS crisis very much starting to impact on everybody. For our international listeners we've used the phrase of a postcode lottery for a long time and Marsha Jane has just given the explanation. The collective NHS that was part of the social contract post-war begins to break down by stealth and the 2012 act was the real push towards privatization which is now effectively in play and Marsha Jane has covered that exquisitely so I'm not going to specifically add anything more to that but sort of linking what Yanis and Marsha Jane has been talking about, what it represents. What it represents for us as a DM 25 UK within this progressive movement. It's going to be a laboratory whereas Brexit showed a global structural malaise of people being reduced to a technical topic down to a binary yes or no forensically. I think Yanis has used the phrase it forensically showed the world how systems like referenda are antithetical to democracy because they break down technical topics into oversimplistic yes or no. The NHS and the work that Marsha Jane is doing on the campaign actually could be part of our active campaigning. Now Dushan we have an exquisite campaign director where we're beginning to encourage to be a lot more campaign active. Now in the UK the NHS of course as we've just said touches everybody. One could say you could argue about everything education, housing and jobs creation. I know the UK team specifically are very passionate about jobs creation. Our medics on the UK team are saying if you don't have job security you're going to have a poor health life journey. In this case it's all interrelated and that's what is confusing. This is why people don't get active because they see a whole issue out there they're overwhelmed by it and our job is to break it down to say you can be active, you can do things. And I think the NHS as Marsha Jane is saying if we work in conjunction the NHS campaign can actually be part of our project of asking people to do things that they can do locally because this is going to impact on them. Austerity is going to impact on 60 million people as it is across Europe. But in that respect what Janice was saying is that we do have to get over our exceptionalism. The UK is no different to any other country going under terrible stress and we have to get over ourselves and do something about it. So the NHS campaign tells us once again how we can act collectively to have that single focus of what it is we want organize ourselves and be able to achieve it. Now we have those good campaign templates for our climate policies and the oligarchs that Dushan is introducing and of course the oligarch campaign sits very nicely with the NHS campaign and certainly the UK team and we would ask anybody specifically in the UK or across the world who has an interest in that that they can keep an eye on the plans that we're going to have to marry those too. So within the context of the political system in the UK the malaise of not acting because things are happening by stealth which of course is a very subtle political technique. As Janice said Boris was a very, very astute politician in knowing what people wanted to hear in the way that Thatcher promoted the dream of privatization because people wanted to hear that they would become better if they became part of a shareholding democracy. It's old wine in new bottles. So the parliamentary system in the UK on the whole would work if 43 million people shone a light now and then and ask questions and spoke to their MP and asked why they voted in the way that they did, for example. There are things that people can do if you have only 20 minutes a week to do something you can do something that just takes 20 minutes if you've got longer time than that you can work on other things. It's getting people into the mindset to say unless we are active, this is what happens. Osterity is a political choice. I'm sure Janice has said that over and over again and it's a political ideology. You don't have to adopt austerity as a government as a political ideology, it's a choice and it's going to come back at us with huge strength and only 43 million people under the system until we change the system can do something about it. The issue about most countries is that you have an engaged group of people who are active but they're not enough of the voting electorate to make a big impact. Now, we mustn't forget in the UK that the UK is made up of four countries and our colleagues in Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales would say please represent us differently because our political systems are moving at a different pace. Scotland with the referenda of Brexit voting to remain are aligning more with the other three nations. Wales has recently introduced an amazing project on universal basic income for the most vulnerable groups of young people in their communities. The devolved assemblies are finding their feet and we should represent that to the world. The world at the moment has just looked at the recent Prime Ministerial pantomime that's been going on and I would urge people to also look at the three other nations because there is positivity and there is hope there as Marsha Jane has pointed out. So I hope that gives a sort of a more global picture and where that NHS campaign can sit within a, maybe a revival of collectivism and maybe structural political change within the UK. Thanks, Julia. Perhaps I could ask you for people outside the UK who are not that familiar with British politics. What is the position of the Labour Party on all this? Is it, I mean, there will be a general election in 2024 if I'm not wrong. What exactly would people be voting for with a vote for the other establishment party in the UK? Well, I'd really be interested. Marsha Jane's had a bit more active campaigning link with the Labour Party. So I'll really be interested to hear what she says to follow me, but my take on it is that unless the Labour Party, there was a very good article as we were reading a couple of days ago, unless the Labour Party finds its focus and where that comes from, whether it's the national, their national executive, the equivalent of the 1922 committee in the Labour Party, whether it comes from there, whether it comes from a new campaigning issue that he's saying, stronger leadership, more unified focus. The phrase that's often been used as convergence politics still says the same. It's a convergence of what it goes on and the excuse of carrying on, for example, austerity politics, which involves more attraction of the public services from 2010, over 70 billion pounds worth of public sector money withdrawn from local authorities where the services are delivered. Now, if the Labour Party cannot embrace that and say that is our single focus, which would have immense popularity in the UK, then they are just going to become a repeat of the coalition where they blend in a Tony Blair-like continuation of what's happening at the moment. So this is a turning, my belief is that this is a pivot point for the Labour Party. It has now a unique set of opportunities to say, embrace the strikes, embrace industrial action, support those sectors who despite privatisation, despite the retraction of the public services into private ownership, we are seeing a resurgence of industrial action. The Labour Party should embrace that when they're very silent on that. They could do that. They could have a single issue about reviving public services, getting more money from the centre into local authorities and accounting for private contractors, as Marsha Jane has alluded to. There's a lot of shady, bad practice, Sheffield blew the lid on that, about contracts being given without due diligence. So what we're talking about here is a latent, poor system that is lacking trust that we're asking to be at the forefront of the future. So the Labour Party could almost pick its projects and say, we can't do everything before the next election, but we'll pick that one and we will be the party of that message. And I think they've got the unique opportunity to do it. They don't look like they're that party at the moment. That is a concept, and I must say, not a DM25 policy review, that is just the Julia UK citizen view. Thank you, Julia. Marsha Jane, just briefly, would you agree with Julia's assessment? In God's way, spiritual, the Labour Party yourself? Yeah, I would agree with that. I mean, the Labour Party could just always win the election on the NHS if it promised to do it properly. And we are seeing some good things from us, Streeting and Kirsten, we're talking about the NHS, talking about really attacking the Tories for what they've done in the last few years, but talking about a long-term workforce strategy. The Conservative Party have promised a workforce strategy now, I think for seven years or something like that, in a row, and just last month kicked it into the long grass. Again, of course, we have 138,000 vacant positions in the NHS, which is adding to it being run down. But as I said, they are also still leaning into we'll use spare private sector capacity to shore up the NHS, which actually has the reverse option. But they're doing some good things. They're talking about mass recruitment in mental health professionals and mass recruitment in nursing and bringing back bursaries. So there's a lot more that they could be saying and doing, but it's obviously the main line from where Streeting and Kirsten created the NHS, Labour fixed it the last time they were in power and they'll fix it again this time. Well, we just have to look at my new share of that as with everything, I guess. OK, thank you, Marsha Jane. Some comments from the chat. Nationalize everything says John Baxter. Fox JC says Kier is sacking people for going on picket lines. Blind stagehand notes that perhaps a more controversial proposal for the NHS. A and E are the only parts of the NHS that should be under national control. The rest should be private wherein you sponsor the individual, not the industry. And there's quite a discussion raging also about the media in the UK, including the Guardian, but maybe we'll tackle that one later. Johannes, Johannes Fair from Germany. Thor is yours. Thank you. I wanted to bring the attention a little bit to Germany that Janis has mentioned earlier already in the current state and also here I can relate very much in terms of our health system going down the drain over the last years because the number of a hospital has been decreasing. The care workers in this country are really at the end of what they can do at work. They're protesting, they're trying something, but politics or the current people in charge in politics are not listening. And we had all of that, of course, caused by neoliberal reforms of the past. We had something that is called in German defile pauschale, something that is a fixed amount that you get, the doctor gets for every treatment he does, which really sends really wrong incentives. So the doctor tries to have as many patients as possible, do it as quick as possible. Certain operations are done too much because there's a certain amount of money per operation and so on and so forth. So everything was trying to be economized and be efficient. And that's actually not incentivizing what the health system actually should be about, which is the health of people. And even our current social democratic health minister, who Mr. Lauterbach, who has been part of these implementations over the last decades, admitted that maybe this kind of fixed amount of money for every operation is not the best system, but of course, saying something and then changing it are two different things and there is no sign of that, unfortunately. One reason why all of that is happening in Germany specifically, cutting costs and privatizing things, for example, in the health system, is that we have a debt break in our constitution. So the state is only allowed to do a certain amount of debt, to invest a certain amount of money, and which is really limiting financing possibilities, for example, for a decent health system, for a good health system for everyone, for the population. And that's why I wanted to bring everyone's attention, especially to the ones out there who are actually in Germany or speak German, to our campaign that we launched this week as DM25 in Germany, along with the beautiful NHS, Save the NHS campaign in UK. In Germany, we have launched the Stop the Debt Break campaign, a DM25 campaign that calls to stop this debt break, at least for last year, but in general, we are also working to abolish it. So if you are interested in helping, there's a website called StoppminusSchuldenbremse.jetz, sorry for the German. So you can go there, do the five steps, and help to stop the debt break in Germany. Thanks. Thanks, Johannes, and you can just go to dm25.org. I'm sure there'll be a link on our front page very soon in case you didn't get the long URL that Johannes was just giving us. Amir, our policy coordinator, Amir. Hi, thanks, Mehran. I just wanted to quickly jump on a point that Julia was talking about and the question around what would we potentially expect from the Labour Party come 2024, if not sooner, if the elections aren't held any sooner. We have to like maybe sort of try to see this question since the former director of the Public Prosecutions, K.S. Thoma, took over the leadership of the Labour Party. Besides losing 200,000 members since 2022, 2020, sorry, the Labour Party has been transformed into a virtual business lobby. And besides, and we also saw this in the chat being commented on, besides forcing his MPs to abstain from voting on giving immunity to British troops overseas and charming as many business leaders as possible, he's also keeping up his appearances on the football stadiums. And I'm just trying to highlight the point here around if you like the impunity that's going on with the office of the official opposition of the United Kingdom. So on International Workers Day of Old Days, he enjoyed a match between West Ham and Arsenal sponsored by a company, Practico. And so in the middle of a war in Europe, cost of living crisis and so on and so on, he's finding time, he found time to attend another 10 games of football matches this year, all sponsored. And we can also imagine with the upcoming World Cup, you know, where his Majesty's most loyal opposition, his attention is going to be. It's definitely not going to be on the pledges he made two years ago during the campaign to take over the leadership of the party. Those 10 promises, it's all gone down the drain. As he's now came out and said, because the financial situation has changed, of course, that's, I mean, one of the pledges was to be an effective opposition to the Tory party. It's got nothing to do with the finances. He's also come out just recently with the new pledges on the public British energy service to backing creative artists to the hilt. He's essentially making promises to everyone and everything. And that also, you know, just one last quick point is we saw already with the very first pledge that he will definitely, of course, keep is the set for support for NATO. We saw when he visited Brussels 10 days, two weeks before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which will further plan to unite the Kingdom into a new Cold War. So this is so we can see from the directionality that there's going to be very little sunlight between the Conservatives and the Labour come 2024. Thank you, Amir. A couple of comments related, actually, on the chat. Just get in the front of me. Jens Olsson says, never vote for a party that excludes some people, a workers' party, farmers' party, fishermen's party will never make things better for all. Michael Kennedy notes that the UK needs a wider proliferation of political parties in order to serve the electorate. OK, related. Søren Heidegger says that health care, education and culture can't be run like businesses or they'll become corrupt. Johanna Freeburn on the unions says, the unions need to separate themselves from Labour. The Labour Party component of union dues should go to a workers' party. Stammer couldn't even bring himself to verbally support striking workers. And a last comment on Stammer from Tommy David. No one with the title, Sir, should ever lead the Labour Party. Eric, Eric Edmund, our political director. Thore Jules, we don't hear you, Eric. I think you're muted, perhaps. There we are. That should do it. Now, I was just saying, it's impossible to follow that. That basically summarised what I wanted to say far better than I could ever say it. Also, a mirror touched on quite a few of the things I wanted to to bring up. First of all, I slightly disagree here with Janis about having the parliament on three separate occasions or two depending on how you count it. But let's say three separate occasions, choosing the primaries of the UK within the same mandate, a mandate that started in I think it was 2019. The UK was in a different place in 2019. And I feel especially in a country where the political system is first past the post and people vote as much as for who they want to represent them as for who they don't want to represent them. So it's very much a system where people do not feel particularly represented politically overall to then separate the electorate even further through these procedures, not the ones, not twice, but three times. I think a more government that had the citizens' interests closer to heart and was more concerned about maintaining political legitimacy in the eyes of the public should have called a general election by now. And I think the reason that they haven't done it is exactly because they do want to discredit this entire process. They want people to be pissed off. They want people to be disheartened and disillusioned by the political process because they've got their core voters. They've got the people who will get them into parliament year after year. So they don't need more people to be inspired by the democratic system in the UK. So this is all entirely this all entirely plays in the hands of the conservatives. So I know that Yannis is not saying that what they did was right. He's just pointing out that this is the process in the UK and that process is legitimate. What I would like to say is that entire process is nonsense. That the political system in the UK is completely unrepresentative. For years, it's been used as an argument that, you know, first, post, the post leads to stable governments. What? Look at the last three, four years, you know. No. Oh, thank God, there hasn't been a coalition government. Imagine the tragedy. Look at the state of the country. It's nothing to do with first pass the post or represent representational electoral processes. It's all to do with maintaining power. And the problem we have in the UK is that there is this culture of let's not rock the boat. We are a stable country. Let's keep it stable and the rest of it, which is day by day being undermined by, well, reality. And on the other hand, you've got people who are so disillusioned by the entire process and they're so fed up by a system that doesn't lead to alternatives that they simply don't engage anymore. And I think really, and if we're going to talk about anything in the UK, if the UK is ever going to get itself out of this mess, it's not by tweaking the current system, but talking about how to overhaul it. And you can only overhaul it if you can get people behind such an overhaul. You need to have the political appetite in society in the UK. And currently, it's not there. People are pissed off, but that anger is not being directed where it's due. And having this discussion about whether Kirstam, I mean, it's not even about Kirstam. Jeremy Corbyn was the head of the Labour Party a few years ago, and he was assassinated by his own party. He was kicked out. He was undermined because these political parties are so stable and are so dependent on that stability. The reason they exist is to maintain the current political system in the UK. That is their their entire political and power foundation. So you can't expect radical change from the mainstream political actors of the United Kingdom. It's it's it's it's a fool's errand. So. Right now, you've got this incredible social momentum in the UK. You've got the the the the rail worker strikes. You've got the the Royal Mail strikes. You you have the discussion about NHS strikes. And there's the growing radicality of the Green Movement in the United Kingdom, much more radical in other places than other places in Europe. Who's going to use that political capital in the UK? Keir Starmer, Sir Keir Starmer and the Labour Party. It's all going to go down the toilet and people are going to get even more frustrated and they're going to lead into further extremes. So honestly, I think that if one is to have an honest political discussion about the United Kingdom, then we really and I know it feels like the world is burning right now. We need to do something tomorrow in the solution that can be applied tomorrow. But I think there is no solution that could be applied tomorrow in the UK because the system is so deeply rooted in the current establishment that no honest political change can happen through the current infrastructure. So any democracy in Europe movement worth its salt should really be talking about about these kind of deeper changes that need to happen in the UK and start building that appetite in society and move away from this discussion about labour and conservatives, because essentially they're both serving the same kind of political and economic interests. Thank you, Eric, Daphne, Daphne Delcara. Yeah, I want to just piggyback a little bit on what Eric was saying. One thing that would really worry me is that, OK, yes, like the first post pass the post system is causing a lot of dysfunction. But I think there is we're at this point where. Like the establishment is almost like displaying its power, like slapping their face, like slapping people's face with it. Like look at Italy, what happened? Like there was the anti establishment parties that tried to break through. They got integrated, tried to break through because their parliamentary system allows it. Then they got integrated. And now as we talked on the Italy stream, it doesn't matter as long as you pledge against the government, even whatever your politics might be, you were the anti establishment. And that brought us the latest Italian government. And I think Sunak was the establishment desire from the beginning. And and like Boris Johnson dropping out and like the establishment won't got what he wanted. And I think anti austerity is important right now, very important. And I think Lista trust knew this. That's why she couldn't sleep with that. So she had to ridiculously choose first the tax cuts as I don't remember who did this. Good decision, Janice, I think. So I mean, I'm very worried, like looking from what happened to Italy and now Sunak will on this horrible atmosphere where like the anti establishment left has been destroyed in the Labour Party. The anti establishment right has been put down in the Conservative Party. And I'm very and now austerity is coming. I'm very concerned about the reaction that's going to breed. It's very scary, in my opinion. Yes, thanks. Thank you, Daphne, Janice, to bring you back in. Eric, the problem is not parliamentarianism. You know, Parliament should have the right to appoint any Prime Minister at one time in the game. Formally speaking, because the only alternative to that is presidential democracy and those are far worse, far, far worse. The problem with the UK, the reason why you have underrepresented government is not because the parliamentary group of the majority of the party can select whoever they want as the Prime Minister. The problem is, first, pass the post, because if you had PR, there would be no Tory government ever to begin with, ever. The tragedy of leaders of the Labour Party and that includes a great French army. I remember pressurizing Jeremy and saying to him, look, you've got to introduce, you've got to adopt PR. It's ridiculous that the Labour Party is not proposing PR. And between us now, nobody's listening, right? It's not as if we're live streaming. I know exactly why Jeremy didn't do it. It's not because he disagreed with PR. I know Jeremy agrees with PR. I'll tell you why, because he was facing a hostile parliamentary Labour Party. He was in a minority of 10 out of all the members of parliament that had been elected under Labour. He was Jeremy, John and another eight people, right? Facing the Blairites in the party. And he knew that the moment he adopted PR as the official party policy, they would lampast him as a defeatist who does not believe even himself that he can win using first pass the post, right? So and the result is that we are all caught up in this conundrum of first pass the post being supported by the two major parties. So but the problem is that that's the one point I want to make. The second point is this. Kirstarmer proved his colours, showed his colours when he was heading the Crown Prosecution Service. I remember vividly in 2011 when he was Director of Public Prosecutions, the glee and the ease with which he prosecuted teenagers, young people who had participated in the Tottenham riots during the aftermath of the great crash of the city of London. He never prosecuted the banker, but he prosecuted to the end of the world and back youngsters who had participated in petty theft. Anybody with that background? I don't care whether he's a sir or not, but you know what I mean. The way in which he systematically was the Trojan horse of the Blarites under Jeremy's leadership. You could tell that he was there, the fifth columnist within the shadow company that he was cleverer than the vet Cooper and the rest in the sense that he declared his loyalty to the leader to Jeremy Corbyn and to the democratic forces within the Labour Party. But he planted several landmines, one of which was the idiotic idea of a second referendum, greatly disrespecting the idea of democracy. We had a referendum, we fought in favour of remain and we lost. And Edgier Stammer, you know, just drove this through and that was driving a stake in the heart of the leadership of the Labour Party at the time and effectively handing over the victory to Boris Johnson in the same way that in 2017 they tried to do the same thing by through a number of coup d'etats within the Labour Party to unseat Jeremy Corbyn, hoping that they would lose the 2017 election to get a referendum. Look, it's really very simple. I experienced that in government in 2015 here in Greece. The establishment does not need. A program. They don't need the Prime Minister. Imagine that, you know, Rishi Sunak and his many colleagues in the cabinet were all going to go on holiday for two years and do nothing. Yeah, just just later. Let's say that we put them in hibernation for two years. Nothing would change. I mean, actually, it would be a good thing because they would not would not introduce new evil policies. The same policies would. But the state will carry on. So the establishment, the status quo, does not need a government. They have a government. They don't need an elected government. They don't need elected politicians to be in the ministers. It's only if you want a rapture with a status quo that you need a progressive policy agenda. Yeah. And the. Greatest impediment to the construction of a progressive policy agenda and its implementation comes from within the ranks of the the loyal opposition to this to the status quo. When I was in the ministry for a short six months, I was there. I didn't mind clashing with the Christian Democrats in Berlin. I didn't mind clashing with the European Central Bank in Frankfurt. I had it was a great, great fun to be clashing against the right in my parliament. The worst pain was experienced during the moments when I would be stabbed in the back by comrades, comrades who were inside our government to ensure that our government would never do anything radical. OK, and the only way of preventing that is to have proportional representation. But let's face it. If we had PR, you know, our comrades in the Labour Party would form their own party like we did in Greece. Thank you. Thank you, Yannis. And we're at the top of the hour. We've gone past it by five minutes, so we're going to have to close there. But thank you to the panel. It's been a great discussion on the UK. There's tons of questions we haven't got round to answering in the chat. So thank you all to you out there for your questions. We can move the discussion to the YouTube comments after this. A couple of URLs for you. If you'd like to join DM 25, it's dm25.org slash join. And if you'd like to participate in the Your NHS Needs You campaign to stop the privatisation of the NHS that our guest, Marsha Jane, is coordinating. She's not coordinating the privatisation. She's coordinating the campaign. Then please go to your NHS needs you.com and you'll find all the details you need there. Thank you again for joining us and we will be back at the same time, same place.